The mass shooting stat that never added up for me

I was reading through a thread about false flags about 3 weeks ago and someone posted a chart showing mass shootings in the US spiking 400 percent since 2010. I do dog grooming in my shop over in Tucson and I keep a little dry erase board for tracking appointments. Out of curiosity I started looking up each event on that list. Turns out about half of them were gang related or drug deal shootings in specific neighborhoods, not random public attacks. The definition they used was super broad like 4 or more people hit by gunfire. I brought this up in the thread and people jumped down my throat calling me a denialist. Has anyone else noticed how these numbers get twisted depending on what you count?

2 comments

2 Comments

patricia_green211mo ago

People do this with all kinds of stats anymore, like how they lump in road rage shootings with school shootings just to make the numbers look scarier. It's the same trick they use with crime stats in general, where they'll say property crime is up but won't mention they started counting petty shoplifting as burglary lol. Makes it hard to trust any headline when the definition keeps moving around.

the_patricia1mo ago

My friend Mike from down the street was telling me about this one time he tried to fact check a viral post about school shootings in 2022. He spent his whole Sunday afternoon looking up each incident on the list and found out almost a third of them were just two kids having a fight in a parking lot where one pulled a gun. The definition the source used counted any time a gun went off near a school property even if nobody was trying to shoot anybody. He said one was a security guard accidentally firing his weapon into the ground while tripping over a curb. He got so frustrated because when he tried to explain it to people they just called him a conspiracy nut and told him to stop making excuses.